While Juniper is pushing QFabric as an interconnect solution for data centers, they also have an additional switching solution for logically managing multiple physical switches. Juniper's Virtual Chassis technology which is deployed on its EX class switches, enables multiple physical switches to be managed as one logical switch.

This week, Juniper expanded the capabilities of Virtual Chassis for the EX8200 switch. Previously, two EX8200 switchescould managed together as a single switch and now Juniper is expanding that to eight. Going a step further, the eight EX8200 switches do not all have to be in the same location. The EX8200 switches that are all managed as one logical switch can now be up to 80 kilometers apart and located in up to four disparate locations.

Dhritiman Dasgupta, senior director, Enterprise Switching & Routing Product Marketing, Platform Systems Division at Juniper explained to InternetNews that, in contrast, QFabric is a solution for a single data center and multiple data centers can be connected via Juniper MX class routers. Prior to the expansion of Virtual Chassis on the EX, those switches would have also required an MX router to connect to a different data center.